THEATER

THEATER; BROADWAY: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

By FRANK RICH

Published: March 29, 1987

A NEW YORK THEATERGOER stricken by an inferiority complex in London could perennially take solace in the one American beachhead along the West End - the musical. For all its classical glories, London has long been dependent on New York for that levitating synthesis of song, dance, drama and performance that is Broadway's one undisputed contribution to world theater. Let Yankee tourists queue up for the Royal Shakespeare Company or National Theater; the hungry locals packed the Drury Lane in Covent Garden to see replicas of Broadway entertainments stretching chronologically from ''Oklahoma!,'' which spread the Rodgers-and-Hammerstein esthetic revolution immediately after World War II, to the current ''42d Street,'' now in its third West End year.

The replicas weren't and aren't always of the highest New York quality - particularly after the imported American leads were succeeded by less fleet British performers in midrun - but they still tended to tower above most English competition. Given the choice, who wouldn't prefer to see an approximate London facsimile of ''A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum'' over some contemporaneous English musical clodhopper like ''Charlie Girl''? The English understood snazzy Broadway showmanship about as well as Margaret Dumont got Groucho Marx's jokes.

Now, however, the world seems to be turning upside down. New York has not produced a single hit musical of its own this season, and no further American musicals are even contemplated for production by summer. The trans-Atlantic jet stream of talent has dramatically reversed direction. Instead of creating musicals that might be exported to the West End, Broadway is frantically mounting duplicates of London hits - some of which star dancing or singing English actors, such as Robert Lindsay and Colm Wilkinson, of the highest caliber. ''Les Miserables,'' an English adaptation of a French spectacle, and ''Me and My Girl,'' a retooled revival of a 1937 London favorite previously unknown to New York, are among the season's most popular productions with both the critics and the public.

According to the trade paper Variety, one of every three Broadway ticket-buyers in mid-March was attending one of those two shows or two other London musical imports, Andrew Lloyd Webber's ''Cats'' and ''Starlight Express.'' Of 22 attractions on Broadway, these four musicals were the only productions not reduced to dumping unsold tickets at the half-price booth. The phenomenon has spread to Off Broadway's nonprofit theaters as well: On the eve of the openings of ''Les Miserables'' and ''Starlight,'' Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival, long a bastion of American theatrical chauvinism, staged the premiere of an elaborate English musical, ''The Knife.''

For the New York theater, the rise of London as a musical-theater capital is as sobering a specter as the awakening of the Japanese automobile industry was for Detroit. Whether it is a real cultural phenomenon or merely a passing series of coincidences is another question. One could argue that the new London musical is a triumph of merchandising and of a handful of English artists, frequently abetted by Americans, rather than a significant and lasting artistic breakthrough. Of the four London musicals currently on Broadway - and the two scheduled for next season, ''The Phantom of the Opera'' and ''Chess'' - all but one (''Me and My Girl'') rely on the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, the director Trevor Nunn, or both. It can also be argued that when Broadway lost the independent producers who once nurtured and assembled its major musicals - starting with David Merrick - it was inevitable that shrewd English impresarios would fill the vacuum by default.

But a case can be made that English musicals have improved, in part by expanding upon the brightest Broadway innovations (as in the staging of ''Les Miserables'') but also by pursuing original, homegrown theatrical notions, some of which tap into (or pander to) the taste of a younger generation with which the New York commercial theater, to its own peril, has long since lost touch. To appreciate just how much English musicals have - and have not -changed on their way to their new status, one must see today's developments in the context of the last period when London shows were the Broadway rage. That was from roughly 1958 until 1965, when a rapid succession of West End musicals arrived in New York, usually under the Merrick aegis. Two of them, ''La Plume de Ma Tante'' and ''Irma La Douce,'' were, like ''Les Miserables,'' anglicized Parisian works. The others included literary adaptations in the reigning American style of ''My Fair Lady'' (''Oliver!,'' ''Pickwick'') and the more Brechtian experiments of Joan Littlewood (''Oh, What a Lovely War'') and Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse (''Stop the World - I Want to Get Off'').

The all-English musicals of this period were often revised, cut or strenuously polished for New York, and only ''Oliver!'' ran as long as two seasons. The 1965 ''Half a Sixpence'' - a fluffy romantic vehicle for Tommy Steele remarkably similar to ''Me and My Girl'' - had to be completely revamped by the American director Gene Saks and choreographer Onna White to satisfy the standards of a Broadway audience by then attuned to the high-flying dance-musical standards of the 1964 blockbusters, ''Hello, Dolly!'' and ''Fiddler on the Roof.''